“[Are we] going to stop crime before it happens because we’re monitoring every utterance and considered incarcerated people?” Kendrick says. “I feel that is one in every of many situations where the technology is way far ahead of the law.”
The Secrurus spokesperson said the tool “is just not focused on surveilling or targeting specific individuals, but reasonably on identifying broader patterns, anomalies, and illegal behaviors across all the communication system.” They added that its function is to make monitoring more efficient amid staffing shortages, “to not surveil individuals without cause.”
Securus may have a neater time funding its AI tool because of the corporate’s recent win in a battle with regulators over how telecom corporations can spend the cash they collect from inmates’ calls.
In 2024, the Federal Communications Commission issued a significant reform, shaped and lauded by advocates for prisoners’ rights, that forbade telecoms from passing the prices of recording and surveilling calls on to inmates. Firms were allowed to proceed to charge inmates a capped rate for calls, but prisons and jails were ordered to pay for many security costs out of their very own budgets.
Negative reactions to this modification were swift. Associations of sheriffs (who typically run county jails) complained they might not afford proper monitoring of calls, and attorneys general from 14 states sued over the ruling. Some prisons and jails warned they might cut off access to phone calls.
While it was constructing and piloting its AI tool, Securus held meetings with the FCC and lobbied for a rule change, arguing that the 2024 reform went too far and asking that the agency again allow corporations to make use of fees collected from inmates to pay for security.
In June, Brendan Carr, whom President Donald Trump appointed to guide the FCC, said it could postpone all deadlines for jails and prisons to adopt the 2024 reforms, and even signaled that the agency desires to help telecom corporations fund their AI surveillance efforts with the fees paid by inmates. In a press release, Carr wrote that rolling back the 2024 reforms would “result in broader adoption of useful public safety tools that include advanced AI and machine learning.”
On October 28, the agency went further: It voted to pass recent, higher rate caps and permit corporations like Securus to pass security costs referring to recording and monitoring of calls—like storing recordings, transcribing them, or constructing AI tools to investigate such calls, for instance—on to inmates. A spokesperson for Securus told that the corporate goals to balance affordability with the necessity to fund essential safety and security tools. “These tools, which include our advanced monitoring and AI capabilities, are fundamental to maintaining secure facilities for incarcerated individuals and correctional staff and to protecting the general public,” they wrote.
FCC commissioner Anna Gomez dissented in last month’s ruling. “Law enforcement,” she wrote in a statement, “should foot the bill for unrelated safety and security costs, not the families of incarcerated people.”
The FCC might be in search of comment on these recent rules before they take final effect.
